Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them.
Vacationland collects these real life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.
Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 24, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780735224810
- File size: 638 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780735224810
- File size: 498 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
August 28, 2017
Mild departures from the routine inspire neurotic palpitations in these dourly funny essays by humorist Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise), who pegs his shaggy-dog stories to several unnerving locales. One is around his second home in rural Massachusetts, where he wrestles with anxiety about taking his garbage to the wrong town’s dump (the right dump is a longer drive), gets high and builds witchy cairns in a river, and fights a seesaw battle against raccoon droppings on his property and field mice in his kitchen. Other essays concern his postcollege arrival in New York, where he revels in sliding-scale-priced therapy with a trainee psychologist (“I could talk about jazz violin all day long and she was professionally obligated to listen thoughtfully and pretend to be interested”), and his horrifying Maine sojourns, featuring taciturn locals, insufferable summer people, and blighted confections (“Fudge is repulsive... like a dark, impacted colon blockage that a surgeon had to remove”). Recurring themes include the yearning for perpetual adolescence, the baffling burdens of adulthood (“Homeowners advice: do not put even a single box of stale Cheerios down the garbage disposal, never mind three”), and liberal self-loathing (“There is no mansplaining like white mansplaining”). Hodgman’s sketches ramble a while and then peter out, but the twists of mordant, off-kilter comedy make for entertaining excursions. -
Library Journal
October 1, 2017
Few writers have experienced New England like comedian and author Hodgman (The Daily Show; The Areas of My Expertise), who was born in Massachusetts and now has multiple summer homes in the area. This is not a standard travelog. There are no descriptions of drives seeking fall foliage or weekends on warm, sunny beaches. Instead, there are the trials and tribulations of having accidental summer homes in Maine and Massachusetts, stories of a cancer-stricken mother, unexpected boat purchases, rebellious raccoons, graveyard wanderings, and perfectly awkward beards. Readers will be laughing out loud or reaching for their computer to verify his other observations. Many will find themselves nodding sagely at the author's accounts and cringing at mistakes they themselves have made. Hodgman's Massachusetts and Maine are uncomfortable, mildly ridiculous, and honestly sentimental in turns, as is, seemingly, the author. VERDICT Though lacking a real sense of closure, this comedic spin across life in the Northeast will be enjoyable for those who relish the travel disasters of others or comedic nonfiction.--Sara Miller Rohan, Archive Librarian, Atlanta
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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